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Spit and Twitches: The Animal Cognition Podcast
By Dr. Dave Brodbeck ([email protected])Natural Sciences
Spit and Twitches: The Animal Cognition Podcast episodes
- Episode 33 (Season 3, Episode 6) - Mark KrauseMark earned his Bachelors and Masters degrees in psychology at Central Washington University. His undergraduate and masters research experience was supervised by Roger Fouts, and was primarily focused on how sign language trained chimpanzees use pointing when interacting with humans. He then completed his PhD at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville under the supervision of Gordon Burghardt. His dissertation research focused on the development of foraging behavior and chemoreception in neonatal garter snakes. Following this Mark completed a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Texas at Austin where, under the supervision of Michael Domjan, he conducted research on Pavlovian conditioning of sexual behavior in Japanese quail. He did another postdoc focusing on the role of androgens on memory and functional brain activity in humans at Oregon Health and Sciences University. Mark is currently a professor of psychology at Southern Oregon University where he teaches courses in behavioral neuroscience, psychopharmacology, and comparative psychology.
Mark is co-editor (with Karen Hollis and Mauricio Papini) of Evolution of Learning and Memory Mechanisms (Cambridge, 2022) and Pointing: Culture, Development, and Evolution (with Kim Bard and David Leavens, Cambridge, 2026). He is co-author (with Daniel Corts and Stephen Smith) of an introductory psychology textbook published in Canada called Introduction to Psychological Science: Modeling Scientific Literacy. Mark serves on the editorial boards for Journal of Comparative Psychology and Animal Behavior and Cognition. Mark has served as president of Division 6 (Behavioral Neuroscience of Comparative Psychology) of the American Psychological Association. Outside of work, Mark has a wonderful family and is a gym rat who drinks too much coffee and reads a lot of fiction.
mp3 download52 min - Episode 32 (Season 3, Episode 5) - Lynne Honey
Lynne completed a BA at Algoma University in 1995 and quickly realized that she needed more out of academia. She went back to Algoma for two more years to complete a thesis and other courses she needed to move on to graduate studies. After a lot of support and encouragement from her undergraduate mentors (including a certain podcast host), Lynne went on to complete a PhD in Jeff Galef’s social learning lab at McMaster University where she got rats drunk so that they could get other rats drunk. After a post-doctoral fellowship at McMaster and SUNY Binghamton, Lynne joined the Department of Psychology at MacEwan University in 2003. It had been her goal to have a career at a teaching-focused university like her alma mater, so the fit at MacEwan has been ideal. Lynne is known for engaging classes with lots of hands-on learning, and has earned a couple of awards for her efforts. Her annual field school in animal learning (affectionately known by students as “bear camp”) provides students with insights about training and husbandry for captive animals.
Lynne’s research and scholarly work has also focused on students and their learning. She’s a co-author of a popular textbook for learning and behaviour, and her research projects are designed to train students in research rather than to build an enviable CV. In fact, her CV resembles a patchwork quilt with topics including human mate choice, personality, dog greeting behaviour in dog parks, and authentic assessment techniques for undergraduate students. Her most recent project involved a captive bear who needed to deal with his past.
Outside of work, Lynne’s got a lot of hobbies and interests. She fosters and trains dogs for a local animal rescue, travels whenever she and her partner Paul can manage it, and is usually planning at least one trip/tattoo/music festival/home renovation at all times. When she retires she would like to become a pro wrestling manager, preferably for a heel.
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0 min - Episode 31 (Season 3, Episode 4) - Jessica BodilyJess received her Bachelors in Psychology with Honors in 2007 from the University of Kentucky. She subsequently earned her MS (2010) and Ph.D. (2013) in Experimental Psychology, both completed in Thomas Zentall’s laboratory at the University of Kentucky. She was a Lecturer of Psychology at the University of Florida from 2013-2017, and at Georgia Southern University from 2017-2020. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the department of psychology at Auburn University at Montgomery.
Her research is in the Cognitive-Behavioral area and centers mainly on decision-making processes and suboptimal choice behavior across species. Her work explores the various conditions under which certain choices occur as well as how aspects, such as personality traits and past reinforcement history, play a role in choice behavior. One of her favorite things about being a faculty member is having the opportunity to introduce students to research and to help them navigate their career path. In addition to mentoring undergraduate researchers in her laboratory, she teaches classes in behavior analysis, cognition, and psychological careers. In 2025, she won the Auburn University at Montgomery’s Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor Award. Jess was a program committee chair for the American Psychological Association Division 6 meeting in 2026 and is currently the President of the Comparative Cognition Society. Away from work, Jess is a mother of three who loves coffee, nature, and watching college basketball and football (War Eagle and Go Cats!).
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48 min - Episode 30 (Season 3, Episode 3) - Dave StahlmanWait, I think this might be the first Dave on the podcast other than, well, you know....
Dave got his B.A. in Neuroscience from Franklin & Marshall College in 2004, where he worked with rats, capuchins, and macaque monkeys. He then completed an M.A. (2006) and Ph.D. (2010) at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied in Aaron Blaisdell’s Comparative Cognition Lab examining the control of behavioral variability. After receiving his Ph.D. he spent three years teaching and doing research at UCLA, working with rats, pigeons, and hermit crabs. In 2012, he received a tenure-track appointment at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA, where he is now a Professor of Psychological Science.
He teaches courses in learning, neuroscience, and research methods, and runs his department’s animal research laboratory with its invertebrate and rat vivaria. He is interested in and has published work on basic behavioral processes. He has also published work on theoretical and philosophical matters, specifically as regards Skinnerian radical behaviorism, to which he was a convert after leaving UCLA. He’d like to think he’s known around his department as a friendly killjoy.
Off-campus, he enjoys Chicago Cubs baseball, going to the movies, and homebrewing odd and time-intensive beers.
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46 min - Episode 29 (Season 3, Episode 2) - Tanya ShootTanya's research is at the intersection of behavioural ecology, evolution, and animal and plant cognition. The main questions they ask revolves around why and how organisms make the decisions they do and how personality, experiences, and environment impact these decisions. This research is both multi-taxa and multi-methods, spanning empirical investigations of nest-building flexibility in zebra finches during their Undergraduate and Masters at Western University, group decision-making in zebrafish and guppies with manipulated personality compositions, and theoretical modelling of the impact of personality in fruit fly populations for their PhD at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Most recently, Tanya has had the opportunity to construct a theoretical framework of what studying plant information processing should look like as a postdoc at the University of Alberta, along with designing empirical experiments to test the framework. Tanya plans to continue this line of research in their relatively new position at CUE and is excited to see how the different branches of plant behaviour compare to what we know about animal behaviour.
We talked about a lot of stuff, we made fun of Noam a bit, ok, maybe that was just me, and we of course did a deep dive on Tanya's plant cognition work.
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0 min - Episode 28 (Season 3, Episode 1) - Madeleine BrodbeckLook, I've been waiting to do this one for quite a while.
Hell, I'm pretty sure I applied for this sabbatical so I could interview Madeleine.
A bit about Maddie:
Madeleine Brodbeck completed her BSc in psychology at Algoma University in Sault Ste Marie, ON in 2015 (I was there for a lot of it, well all of it really I suppose).
Maddie then moved on to the University of Western Ontario and the Advanced Facility for Avian Research (AFAR). At AFAR she worked under the supervision of Scott MacDoguall-Shackelton and David Sherry.
Her PhD work focussed on brain regions associated with electromagnetic field perception in songbirds. Her MSc work was on memory in brown headed cowbirds (which she is revisiting, stay tuned).
She currently works as a research assistant and lab manager for the quantitative linguistics group at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
In her non science time she loves travelling, cooking (food in general really) and video games.
We talked about science, and some not science, as well as stuff and things. (I quite clearly do these writeups before the interview, in fact, most of it is written by the guest).
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1 hr - Episode 27 - (Season 2, Episode 8) - Marisa HoescheleScientist and metal drummer Marisa Hoeschele received an honours B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Philosophy at the University of Guelph, Canada in 2006. After that she completed an M.Sc. and PhD in Psychology with a specialization in Comparative Cognition and Behaviour at the University of Alberta, Canada.
In 2013 she moved to Vienna as a post-doc and built the budgie lab at the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna. In October 2018 she started her own group, known as the “Musicality and Bioacoustics” group, at the Acoustics Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This institute has researchers from many different disciplines all studying problems in acoustics: however the first animal studies were not conducted on site until this year in April when the budgie lab was moved to the institute. Marisa studies how different animals, including humans, perceive and produce sounds. The broader goal is to understand where music and language come from and what other similar capacities might exist in the animal kingdom.
Marisa is the first guest I've had on who had a pop filter on her mic. That's neither here nor there but it's still a thing.
We talked, of course, about how Marisa got into the field in the first place, a bit about Austria and, obviously about her work. Her work is interdisciplinary and we talked a bit about how this sort of thing is important not just in animal cognition, but in any field.
mp3 download0 min - Episode 26 (Season 2, Episode 7) - Jennifer FooteWoo hoo! This one should be fun. Partly because I'm talking to.a friend and colleague from Algoma University. Also because it will be only the second episode I've done face to face. Jenn Foote came by my podcast studio (OK, look, I have two podcasting studios in my house, because I'm me, so to be clear, she came to Studio B). and we talked about her work, her origin story, and other stuff.
Jenn Foote completed a BSc. Honours in Biology from St. Mary's University, where her thesis research investigated how neighbour-stranger discrimination in song sparrows was influenced by breeding stage of females. She then moved up the road and completed MSc. in Biology at Dalhousie University where she demonstrated that Eastern song sparrows in NS share songs like west coast birds and unlike other eastern song sparrows. Both her BSc. and MSc. work was supervised by Colleen Barber. Jenn completed a PhD at Queen's with Laurene Ratcliffe where she studied dawn chorus communication networks of black-capped chickadees and demonstrated that males interact vocally at dawn and those interactions sometimes included three or more males. She then did a short postdoc with Dan Mennill at University of Windsor before moving to Algoma University in 2010. She then moved to Algoma University where her lab, the OVEN (Ornithology, Vocalization, and Ecology Network) has been studying vocal behaviour of northern Ontario songbirds. The OVEN does in fact study ovenbirds.
mp3 download0 min - Episode 25 (Season 2, Episode 6) - Fiona Cross
OK, look, I won't lie, I do love talking to all of the people who have come on the podcast. But, there is one person I've been hoping to talk to since way back in Season 1. It's FIONA CROSS!
Fiona got her BSc (Hons) in Psychology in 2001 before she began working with spiders and then she got her MSc (with Distinction) in Zoology in 2003 and her PhD in Zoology in 2009, with all three degrees being at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Dr. Cross first went to Kenya to work with spiders in 2006, and has been a Visiting Scientist at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (in Kenya) since 2010. Her research interests include selective attention, working memory, expectancy violation, and problem solving by spiders. Fiona never used to think that spiders could be particularly interesting, but she has since learned that spiders can do many remarkable things that could keep a person awake at night.
Dr. Cross has 46 publications, and her work has featured in many news sources including The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, BBC, The Guardian, The New Zealand Herald, and Radio New Zealand. Fiona is sorta famous really, to quote her 'I got a fright when I first discovered there is a Wikipedia page about me, and I had to sit down when I discovered that a video about me had been viewed 12,000 times in one day'. (BTW, that fame is well deserved, she rocks). As an aside, there used to e a wikipedia page about me, but it was deleted because I suck....
She loves to communicate science, and has so far organized three of her own international speaking tours (one in the UK and two in North America). COVID permitting, she hopes to run a spider event for children at the Christchurch public library in October (the month of the year that arachnologists affectionately refer to as ‘Arachtober’). She's also keen on writing for all ages.
You can learn more about her and her work at her website (www.doctorspider.net).
mp3 download0 min - Episode 24 (Season 2, Episode 5) - Mike Beran
Michael J. Beran is Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Language Research Center at Georgia State University. He received his B.A. in Psychology from Oglethorpe University in 1995, his M.A. in 1997, and his Ph.D. in 2002, both from Georgia State University. His research is conducted with human and nonhuman primates, including chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, capuchin monkeys, and rhesus monkeys. He also has done research with bears, elephants, and robins. His research interests include perception, numerical cognition, metacognition, planning and prospective memory, self-control, decision making, and language acquisition.Dr. Beran is a Fellow of Division 3 and Division 6 of the American Psychological Association and a Fellow of the Psychonomics Society. He was the inaugural Duane M. Rumbaugh Fellow at Georgia State University. He received the Brenda A. Milner award from the APA in 2005. He has served as the President of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the Southeast Psychological Association, and the Society for Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology (Division 6 of APA). He is the current Editor of Animal Behavior and Cognition and has served on numerous editorial boards including Cognition, Animal Cognition, Frontiers in Comparative Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, the Journal of Comparative Psychology, Learning and Behavior, and the International Journal of Comparative Psychology. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and contributed chapters to over 50 edited books and encyclopedia. He also is the co-editor of Foundations of Metacognition (2012, Oxford University Press), the author of Self-control in Animals and People (2018, Elsevier), and the co-editor of the forthcoming Primate Cognitive Studies (2022, Cambridge University Press).
Mike gets 2 pics because I love this slideHis research has been featured on numerous television and radio programs and in magazines, including Animal Planet, BBC, New Scientist, the Wall Street Journal, and Scientific American Mind. His research is supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Templeton Foundation, and the European Science Foundation.
In addition to the fun things he gets to do in his lab and with his students and colleagues, he enjoys beekeeping, hiking, paintball with friends (and enemies!), travel, and the occasional good bourbon. And, of course, ‘Bama football. Roll Tide.
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About Spit and Twitches: The Animal Cognition Podcast
From the publisher's feed
A podcast where scientists who study animal cognition talk about their research.